pkgsrc – Page 7 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/05/032014/05/03

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/03

Updated late this week because of circumstances.

Michael W. Lucas is appearing at PenguinCon.
Do you use Kerberos or SRP in libssl? Ted Unangst wants to know. (Thanks, Amit Kulkarni)
Speaking of which, OpenSSH no longer requires OpenSSL.
OpenBSD 5.5 is out.
BSD for embedded devices?
The FreeBSD Foundation has a spring fundraising campaign started.
PC-BSD has a FAQ up for their new Lumina desktop environment.Writing your own desktop environment is a lot of work. Supporting all the Linuxisms in the existing ones is possibly worse…
pkgsrc Perl package status is now automatically generated.
Peek and poke freely on FreeBSD.
PC-BSD’s new AppCafe handles package management – or at least the interface. I haven’t looked hard enough to know if it’s using pkg.
CheriBSD is feeding back.
OpenSSH is getting pulled into parts?
/dev/full is always what it says it is. (related: lindev(4) is gone.)
OpenBSD 5.5 is out. Here’s the signing policy that goes with it.

2014/04/262014/05/01

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/26

Another active week.

RetroBSD recently moved to Git and GitHub, and is now buildable on Mac OS X.
ALTQ is gone, at least for the OpenBSD version of pf.
So I’ll bring up this point again: pf is fragmenting, and we should do something about it.
The EdgeBSD presentation from FOSDEM 2014. (via)
OpenBSD could use some VLAN testing.
FreeBSDNews is running an swag contest.
netbsd.fi replaces onetbsd.org.
Here’s a GSoC project that could help everyone. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
I’ve linked to some parts of this work, but Undeadly has a summary of the man page search improvements in OpenBSD.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/04/14 summary.
LibreSSL started because of a leaky water heater.
I always like threads about small hardware.
FreeNAS hardware unboxing.
Man, everybody likes pfSense.
Lua in pkgsrc is getting versioned.
Why would you do this?

2014/04/192014/04/18

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/19

I’ve got “coverage” of most every BSD this week.

OpenBSD has brought in OpenSSL – and is modifying it severely. Instead of linking to the many commits as they tear it into little bits, I’ll just link to this Lobste.rs post. Will it be OpenOpenSSL? It looks like it’s for internal consumption only. Undeadly has a similar summation. Apparently there’s a running blog of the changes, or at least the snarky comments.
Have you never been to BSDCan? Dan Langille asks the question. As he points out, BSD conventions are awesome, where you get to meet some smart people and put names to faces.
“I have been given the option of Linux or BSD at work…” A discussion of BSD as a Java development platform.
FreeBSD has added the if_nf10bmac(4) driver, for the “NetFPGA-10G Embedded CPU Ethernet Core”, which appears to be a programmable network card? I’m not sure how it all works together.
Goodbye EISA on FreeBSD. (Gone long ago on DragonFly.)
NetBSD src and pkgsrc changes are being twittered. (NetBSD link does not work just now when I tried it.)
PC-BSD Digest 26 mentions the addition of a new desktop environment called Lumina, built just for PC-BSD.

2014/04/16

One weird trick for dports

Remember: If you have a particular port that’s not building in DragonFly, there may be a patch in pkgsrc that could be brought over, as John Marino points out.

2014/04/052014/04/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/05

Another week.

BSDCan 2014 will have the BSD Professional Certification exam available (as beta)
“The Design And Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” second edition, is up for pre-order. (comments are rude/funny.)
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/31.
The PC-BSD Digest 24.
reop, an follow-up from OpenBSD’s signify
The FreeBSDNews link roundup.
Michael W. Lucas follows up on a prank with a description of how to get a BSD convention going.
Peter N. M. Hansteen wants feedback on his BSDCan tutorials.
Joystick support always sounds like a good idea.
The Playstation 2 is back as a NetBSD platform.
Turn partitions into disk images on FreeBSD.
You can possibly create x86 USB images with NetBSD. (you couldn’t before?)
NetBSD imported starsign, for signing data. Since it’s an external program, I tried searching for its origin… Google failed spectacularly, with astrology links galore.
NetBSD also added dust, which appears to be a sensible utility. (Update: both this and starsign apparently written by Alistair Crooks.)
I didn’t know serial ports could go this fast.
pkgsrc-2014Q1 is out.
Pkgsrc is looking at signing packages, too.
Some conversation about building machines with a bunch of network ports. From openbsd-misc, but probably applies across the board.
Video of the April 1 NYCBUG presentation on random number generation is available.

2014/03/222014/03/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/22

I have a list of commits I’ve saved between the various BSDs of licenses getting corrected to the 2-clause BSD license; that would definitely be a good cross-BSD project to sync.

DiscoverBSD has a free KVM VPS for the taking – if you write about the BSD-specific thing you are doing with it.
Also, DiscoverBSD’s news summary for the 17th.
OpenBSD packages are generally up to date. The place I found this linked has comments noting the need to run multiple versions of Ruby to test – even multiple subversions, like different revisions of 1.9.x. I think that points at a different problem…
There’s mg, which is a ‘micro GNU/Emacs’, found in OpenBSD. There’s also apparently a portable version. (via)
OpenBSD’s upd(4) needs testing.
OpenBSD has switched to Unbound, and it is apparently easy to enable DNSSEC.
I didn’t expect rcp to be removed from OpenBSD, or a Thulsa Doom reference.
Two small package managers for OpenBSD: sqlport and pkg_mgr.
The hp300, mvme68k and mvme88k ports are gone from OpenBSD.
If you’re using pkgsrc, php-fpm may be a better module than mod_php.
FreeBSD has a faster SHA2.
pkgsrcCon 2014’s Call for Papers is up.
PC-BSD Digest 22.
Hubert Feyrer has linked some NetBSD-specific slides from AsiaBSDCon 2014.
Michael W. Lucas’s NYCBSDCon 2014 talk is up on Youtube.

2014/03/152014/03/15

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/15

Another week with lots of links.

DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/03/10.
PC-BSD Digest 21 – 10.0.1 release.
FreeBSDNews needs a new maintainer. (am I the old man of BSD blogs? Yeesh.)
FreeBSDNews also has two FreeNAS videos.
OpenBSD is starting on USB 3 support. I assume this is separate from USB4BSD?
OpenBSD has moved to OpenSMTPD by default.
Hubert Feyrer has a summary of recent ARM developments in NetBSD.
The 2014Q1 freeze for pkgsrc starts effectively today, lasting two weeks.
Eric Radman pointed out that non-linear editing is possible on the BSDs using Blender, and here’s a tutorial.
FreeBSD had an ABI change, so rebuild carefully on master.
Man pages added by Microsoft to FreeBSD. It makes sense, but it still makes me pause.
Apache is out of OpenBSD base.
The window manager cwm has been made portable, meaning it’s not just for OpenBSD now.
IPX and AppleTalk have been removed from FreeBSD.

2014/03/082014/03/08

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/08

Links everywhere this week!

ZFS 101. This might be the same material presented at NYCBSDCon; I’m not sure.
Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script.
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/03.
PC-BSD Weekly Digest 20.
Theo De Raadt questions for a Slashdot interview.
OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 is released.
Introduction to FreeNAS development.
GhostBSD activity. (via)
FreeNAS is now 64-bit only. (via)
OpenBSD package building on larger machines.
pkgsrcCon 2014 is happening June 21-22 in London, UK.
The schedule for BSDCan 2014 is out.
Merkletrees. Don’t know what it’s for; just like the name.
NetBSD has a versioning system called ‘bikeshed’. It appears to mostly be plans at this point.
OpenBSD has added qlw(4), a driver for QLogic ISP SCSI HBAs.
Apparently some quirks from decades ago still survive.
Random is more random on BSD than on Linux. (see last paragraph) (via)
If you keep an emergency towel, you may get this joke.

2014/02/222014/02/21

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/22

Read the first item, if nothing else.

You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
Power failure resistance.
LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.

2014/02/152014/02/16

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/15

Lots of links, yet again.

Michael W. Lucas intends to have more BSD books out this year – at least 2. He goes into great detail on his plans. He hints at other authors with material on the way.
BSD-linked Twitter accounts. I like finding accounts of individual developers, so you can see what projects people are working on. (plz suggest)
The PC-BSD Weekly Digest 16 and number 17.
The latest freebsdnews.net summary.
Another BSD-based product I didn’t know about.
FreeBSD has a new version of netmap.
NetBSD and FreeBSD have brought in version 2.0 of ATF, the Automated Test Framework.
FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s RNDIS framework.
More cross-BSD fixes.
Found through this OpenBSD sendmail upgrade: Sendmail, Inc., is now owned by a company called Proofpoint? A ‘security-as-a-service’ provider. I don’t know how to feel about this.
OpenBSD has Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230, 2200/105/135 support.
OpenBSD supports qle(4), the QLogic ISP24xx fibre channel HBA.
First Impressions of FreeBSD 10 on Distrowatch. (via)
The minimum acceptable OpenSSL for pkgsrc has been bumped up.
Undeadly has several n2k14 hackathon reports.
Ahem. (via Freenode #nycbug)

2014/02/082014/02/06

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/08

As you read this, I’m at NYCBSDCon – or at least should be.

FOSDEM 2014 videos are up. The second item listed is about the new version of ports, which includes dports. (via)
Crochet-FreeBSD, a system for building bootable FreeBSD images for a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, and VM. (via Markus Pfieffer on IRC, indirectly)
Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures. Seen previously at BSDCan. ‘Greytrapping’, mentioned in the article, is new to me.
Email delivery headaches. Mailing many people is somehow almost always a low-level irritation.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/03 roundup.
Another n2k14 hackathon report. DragonFly uses that DHCP client he’s talking about.
PC-BSD on eWeek.
bsd-cloudinit – FreeBSD on OpenStack. (via)
OpenBSD gained some VAX hardware. The only VAX hardware I ever saw was 6 feet tall; I can’t imagine these are easy to ship.
OpenBSD updated to ldns 1.6.17.
Seen via a pkgsrc list: Berlios.de is closing down its hosting, so this may affect you if you usually grab your pkgsrc packages from there.
The proper way to break the FreeBSD ABI.
Robert Watson’s privilege ideas.
How to switch between mfi(4) and mrsas(4) on FreeBSD. mrsas(4) sounds like MRSA to me, which is a bit more worrisome
FreeBSD supports MegaRAID Fury cards.
The plan for ATF removal in NetBSD.
DragonFly takes the FreeBSD patch(1) updates, and that’s fine, because FreeBSD made those changes to an import of DragonFly’s patch(1). Hooray for cross-pollination!

2014/02/012014/01/31

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/01

For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!

OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.

2014/01/112014/01/10

In Other BSDs for 2014/01/11

Running late putting this together… Back to bullets!

The weekly PC-BSD digest for January 3rd.
DiscoverBSD’s weekly roundup.
PC-BSD’s weekly digest.
Jailing FreeBSD 4 on FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD 4 has been a very long-lived release, so to speak.
OpenBSD has a new auto-install feature that needs to be tested.
Julio Merino has plans for his test suite on FreeBSD, and will be giving a tutorial on it at AsiaBSDCon 2014.
OpenBSD has a new ‘signify’ program for cryptographically signing and verifying files.
Ingo Schwarze has been implementing various optimizations for mandoc in OpenBSD. gprof helps.
FreeBSD has updated netmap.
python-3.2 is probably going to be removed from pkgsrc; it’s redundant to all the other versions.
FreeBSD’s gcc version is being made more compatible to clang by incorporating some Apple changes.

2013/12/212013/12/20

In Other BSDs for 2013/12/21

Odds and ends for the quieter holidays.

Hubert Feyrer spotted this video interview of Amitai ‘schmonz’ Schlair about NetBSD.
OpenBSD has tmpfs.
PC-BSD has made it through a pkg upgrade.
pkgsrc is frozen until at least the end of the month, for pkgsrc-2013Q4.
OpenBSD wants to shift electrical costs. (via)
The DiscoverBSD weekly roundup.
Managing custom ports. (can apply to dports too)
Building tcsh on 4.3BSD-Quasijarus. This led me to…
4.5BSD. An ambitious project.
A pfSense video review.
Steryana Shopova is this past week’s Faces of FreeBSD.
OpenBSD had a head start on not trusting RNGs.
OpenBSD has a new vioscsi(4) driver.
Michael W. Lucas’s books are available through OpenBSD.
FreeBSD Kitten. (via NYCBUG)

2013/12/092013/12/09

A BSD plan: license summaries

I had a sometimes-great, sometimes-difficult trip to New York City over the past few days, and while I was there, I met the ball of energy that is George Rosamond of NYCBUG (which is having a huge party right now.) He and I talked for a bit about various aspects of the BSD ecosystem, and one thing he noted was that people aren’t generally aware of all the licenses in use for the different software packages on the system, or even the individual licenses in the system files.

There is an ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES setting in pkgsrc, where software licensed under terms not in that list won’t install. That’s useful, but frustrating, because it keeps people from getting what they asked for – a software install. Something that would be useful – and it could be cross-BSD very easily – would be a license audit summary.

There’s meta-data on every package in FreeBSD’s ports and DragonFly’s dports and pkgsrc and OpenBSD’s port system. Why not say ‘pkg licenses’ in the same way you can say ‘pkg info’, and get a summary of the licenses you have installed in the system? (or pkg_licenses, etc. You get the idea) This wouldn’t prevent people from installing software, but it would give a very quick view of what you were using.

> pkg licenses

Software package License ---------------- ------- foo-2.2.26 Apache license bar-7.999999 Donateware baz_ware-20131209 MIT quux-silly-6.5 BSD

It could be extended to the base system, but I’d like to see this in all the packaging systems as a common idea, in the same way that ‘info’ in a packaging command always shows what’s installed.

2013/12/072013/12/04

In Other BSDs for 2013/12/07

Happy birthday to me!

Is Your Stack Protector Working? On Undeadly, so it’s OpenBSD.
ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH. (via)
The next PC-BSD 10.0 image is available.
Reid Linnemann is the latest in the Faces of FreeBSD series.
NetBSD has updated file.
FreeBSD’s iwn(4) driver has some updates (also in DragonFly).
FreeBSD now has casperd, for controlling access to out-of-sandbox capabilities.
FreeBSD’s oce(4) driver now supports 40Gb devices. (yay for manufacturer support)
FreeBSD has Hyper-V drivers.
OpenBSD’s ifconfig now shows the NWID, channel, and BSSID for IBSS networks.
OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.32.4.
pkgsrc’s 2013Q4 freeze will start on the 16th.
How old is who? (Don’t tell me 900 years.)
There’s a broken builds list for pkgsrc-2013Q4 for anyone who wants to help.
Hacker News had a link to the FreeBSD version of the BSD Family Tree, which is not unique, but the comments led to some interesting links, like this story of an 8-year NetBSD uptime.
FreeBSDNews’s summary.
All the AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos. (Last week’s link was just OpenBSD ones.)
FreeBSD authentication against Samba 4 LDAP. I’m going to need this for the DragonFly machine I’m setting up in the same role at work… in my copious spare time.

2013/11/162013/11/15

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/16

Not as much pulled directly from the source lists this time, which is good.

It’s no surprise that I would say this, but: it makes me happy to see other BSD projects doing regular summaries, like this one or that one for PC-BSD or this general BSD summary.
A random PC-BSD review found via Google Search.
PC-BSD 10 test images are available. I wonder if that’s related to the eleventy-billion commits lately out of the PC-BSD Github account?
OpenBSD/CARP, Cisco, and schadenfreude.
The FreeBSD Foundation’s annual fundraising is on; they have already made it well along, but there’s still lots of dollars to go.
OpenBSD now has automatic disk mounting.
g4u 2.6 has entered beta. It’s “Ghost for Unix”, which gives you an idea of what it does.
EuroBSDCon 2013 DevSummit video recordings are up. I said there would be video all week, didn’t I?
Using OpenBSD with Vagrant and Veewee. Those tool names sound somewhat rude.
pbulk bulk builds for pkgsrc made easy. I was working on a script like this.
Cross–pollination makes me happy.
svn in FreeBSD is updated.
FreeBSD supports the MediaTek/Ralink RT5370/RT5372 chipset.
nvi still gets updates.
FreeBSD supports the (takes deep breath) Freescale Vybrid Family VF600 heterogeneous
ARM Cortex-A5/M4 SoC. (exhales)
FreeBSD has an IEEE Organizationally Unique Identifier. Not sure what it means.
NetBSD has a new game, hals_end. If you saw 2001 the movie, you may guess the contents.
OpenBSD has a new ugl driver for the Genesys Logic GL620USB-A
USB host-to-host link cable.

2013/11/092013/11/08

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/09

Not sure why, but there wasn’t a lot of things this week to pick out.

A short discussion of Perfect Forward Secrecy on pkgsrc-users.
PC-BSD apparently (used to) play a movie on first boot.
FreeBSD now has a ‘mini-memstick‘ install option. (a later messages says ~200M in size.)
FreeBSD has updated aacraid.
OpenBSD supports the RTS5229 card reader in rtsx(4).
OpenBSD has updated OpenSSH, and NetBSD has updated. (DragonFly has a fix for the underlying problem.)
OpenBSD has FUSE support.

2013/11/022013/11/01

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/02

There’s a surprisingly large list this week.

FreeBSD has updated netmap.
FreeBSD supports VT-d DMAR hardware. Not totally sure what that is.
FreeBSD supports the RealTek RTL8168G, RTL8168GU, RTL8411B, and RTL8168EP.
FreeBSD updated byacc to version 20130925.
FreeBSD has binary packages again.
Managed Services using FreeBSD at NYI, a whitepaper.
NetBSD has imported OpenBSD’s support for ASIX AX88178a and AX88179 USB network interfaces, in the axen(4) driver.
NetBSD supports the Broadcom BCM56340 iProc based switch.
OpenBSD supports unattended installation. See Also on Undeadly.
OpenBSD has softraid booting documentation. Someone will find this useful, I’m sure.
OpenBSD 5.4 is released.
Inspecting Packets with OpenBSD and pf, the presentation from vBSDCon.
Lua in pkgsrc has been modified.
Ocaml in pkgsrc has been updated to 4.0.1.
The BSD Router Project has hit 1.5. (via)
PC-BSD 10 alpha images are available for testing.
PC-BSD is doing weekly updates, an idea I support, unsurprisingly.
No BSD systems in Google Code-In this year, darnit.

2013/10/282013/10/28

Discontented with contention? Be content.

Matthew Dillon wrote a roundup post summarizing all the changes he’s made to DragonFly to improve SMP performance in the last few weeks. He’s removed almost all contention from DragonFly. This means better performance, scaling upward depending on the number of processors.

‘monster’, the system that builds all 20,000 items in dports, can complete the run in 15 hours. Compare this to the 2 weeks it used to take me to build the 12,000 packages in pkgsrc. This is admittedly on different hardware and different packaging systems, but it gives a sense of the scale of the improvement.